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What do you think "you" are exactly? * Are you a specific arrangement of atoms. If so, then you are constantly dying and being reborn. * Are you a specific ar

What do you think "you" are exactly? * Are you a specific arrangement of atoms. If so, then you are constantly dying and being reborn. * Are you a specific arrangement of neurons? If so you die and are reborn every time a memory is created or a brain cell dies. * Are you an uninterrupted process of consciousness that evolves from one state to another? If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep. * Are you your soul? Give me a rigorous definition of soul. Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an exact physical copy of your body and brain was constructed (down to the subatomic level) and then I woke you both up at once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I didn't tell you which one was which? "Identity" is a human abstraction, not a fundamental physical quality. We're examining hypothetical areas where that abstraction leaks.

jonhohle 10y ago
> Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an > exact physical copy of your body and brain was constructed > (down to the subatomic level) and then I woke you both up at > once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I didn't > tell you which one was which? imagine you had something similar to a Star Trek replicator which could clone arbitrary objects down to the subatomic level. if you cloned a unique keepsake, the clone wouldn't _be_ the keepsake, but would be identical to the keepsake. Multiple equivalent instances is a separate concept from identity (and from the point of being awoken, I'd imagine clones would instantly diverge). Identical twins are a real world example of this. At one point, they are the same organism and split into essential two identical entities. They are two unique individuals. At the point of splitting, their identity diverges.
- kamaal 10y ago
  >>Multiple equivalent instances is a separate concept from identity Which is precisely the question your parent commenter asked here. What do you exactly mean by the term 'you' or 'identity'?
netsharc 10y ago
I am currently replying to you. My eyes see my phone screen, my hands feel the phone vibrating, my brain is thinking about the words to type. If I go into a red box that makes a copy of me and puts him in a blue box, and we are awakened, my brain would say "According to my sense of sight, I'm in a red box.". There is another person in a blue box, which objectively is me as well, but subjectively..? If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a party. Friends can say netsharc experienced a party, since the copy will behave 100% like me. If they ask "is that really you?", my copy will believe he is, he has my/his memory, etc... even if he asks himself if he is me, he will say yes. But I still would have missed the party! Another theory asks you to consider this scenario: every week/month, they replace 1% of your brain with its equivalent, identically functioning electronic part. After 1 week, your brain is 99% biological and 1% electronic. Surely you'll still feel like the normal you. What happens after 100 weeks? And what will happen if the data in that electronic brain is uploaded to the cloud/a robot? Or copied to another e-brain?
- grondilu 10y ago
  > If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a party. Your copy can. Her experience is as real as yours, and from her point of view, everything happened exactly as if her consciousness had been transferred from the original body to the copy. To me she's just as legitimate as you are to use the word "I" : both points of view are two different future versions of what was "you" before the copy was created. I don't privilege any.
zyxley 10y ago
> Are you an uninterrupted process of consciousness that evolves from one state to another? Yes. > If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep. No. That's a silly claim; the brain doesn't literally shut off during sleep, and I am not composed of only conscious processes.
- sparky_z 10y ago
  "No. That's a silly claim; the brain doesn't literally shut off during sleep" Fine then, cryosleep. Total biologically-inert suspended animation. Would that change your answer?
  - jhbadger 10y ago
    The concept of "biologically-inert suspended animation" isn't really feasible though. I'm not just talking about how we can't do it with modern technology; I'm saying non-lethal freezing doesn't yield a "paused" biologically inert sample. Freezing living cells (which we do now), doesn't do that -- it just greatly slows down biological processes (which is also why frozen food doesn't last forever).
throwanem 10y ago
> What do you think "you" are exactly? A durable process, running on a human brain, that refers to itself in the first person singular and has a nasty habit of assuming it's the whole point of the exercise. (And which does something like checkpointing so that, when it crashes and comes back up, it can restore some state and pretend it's the same process as it was at last checkpoint.) This process can be impaired or disabled entirely, whether permanently by brain lesions or temporarily by transcranial magnetic stimulation. "I" can be made to believe it is dead, or to cease functioning entirely. Curiously, this does not result in the state commonly described as "unconsciousness" - itself a telling choice of name. Humans in this state remain aware of their environments and exhibit executive and cognitive function. While cognition is often somewhat deranged and maintenance of the body lacking, the possibility is quite real that humans can, and perhaps do, function perfectly well without any self-awareness whatsoever. I find this idea disquieting, but then of course I would, because it suggests "I" am far from the irreducible essence "I" like to imagine "myself" to be, and indeed this body might function more to both its own benefit and that of society if "I" did not exist at all. The instinct toward self-preservation appears to inhere in consciousness as well as in the organism entire, so of course it makes sense that consciousnesses should fancy the idea of preserving their existence, even as copies with no ongoing continuity of identity past the point of duplication, at a frankly astonishing resource investment with its concomitant opportunity cost. Nonexistence is after all the ultimate terror for something whose most fundamental verity is the basically egotistical axiom that it exists. But the very fact that this idea of self-preservation at ruinous cost seems other than prima facie absurd to consciousness is in itself perhaps evidence that consciousness is maladaptive.

jonhohle 10y ago

> Here's a question: What if, instead of a digital copy, an > exact physical copy of your body and brain was constructed > (down to the subatomic level) and then I woke you both up at > once. Is one of you you and the other not? What if I didn't > tell you which one was which? imagine you had something similar to a Star Trek replicator which could clone arbitrary objects down to the subatomic level. if you cloned a unique keepsake, the clone wouldn't _be_ the keepsake, but would be identical to the keepsake. Multiple equivalent instances is a separate concept from identity (and from the point of being awoken, I'd imagine clones would instantly diverge). Identical twins are a real world example of this. At one point, they are the same organism and split into essential two identical entities. They are two unique individuals. At the point of splitting, their identity diverges.

kamaal 10y ago
>>Multiple equivalent instances is a separate concept from identity Which is precisely the question your parent commenter asked here. What do you exactly mean by the term 'you' or 'identity'?

netsharc 10y ago

I am currently replying to you. My eyes see my phone screen, my hands feel the phone vibrating, my brain is thinking about the words to type. If I go into a red box that makes a copy of me and puts him in a blue box, and we are awakened, my brain would say "According to my sense of sight, I'm in a red box.". There is another person in a blue box, which objectively is me as well, but subjectively..? If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a party. Friends can say netsharc experienced a party, since the copy will behave 100% like me. If they ask "is that really you?", my copy will believe he is, he has my/his memory, etc... even if he asks himself if he is me, he will say yes. But I still would have missed the party! Another theory asks you to consider this scenario: every week/month, they replace 1% of your brain with its equivalent, identically functioning electronic part. After 1 week, your brain is 99% biological and 1% electronic. Surely you'll still feel like the normal you. What happens after 100 weeks? And what will happen if the data in that electronic brain is uploaded to the cloud/a robot? Or copied to another e-brain?

grondilu 10y ago
> If I go to bed and my copy goes out to party, I can't say I experienced a party. Your copy can. Her experience is as real as yours, and from her point of view, everything happened exactly as if her consciousness had been transferred from the original body to the copy. To me she's just as legitimate as you are to use the word "I" : both points of view are two different future versions of what was "you" before the copy was created. I don't privilege any.

zyxley 10y ago

> Are you an uninterrupted process of consciousness that evolves from one state to another? Yes. > If so, you die and are reborn every time you fall asleep. No. That's a silly claim; the brain doesn't literally shut off during sleep, and I am not composed of only conscious processes.

sparky_z 10y ago
"No. That's a silly claim; the brain doesn't literally shut off during sleep" Fine then, cryosleep. Total biologically-inert suspended animation. Would that change your answer?
- jhbadger 10y ago
  The concept of "biologically-inert suspended animation" isn't really feasible though. I'm not just talking about how we can't do it with modern technology; I'm saying non-lethal freezing doesn't yield a "paused" biologically inert sample. Freezing living cells (which we do now), doesn't do that -- it just greatly slows down biological processes (which is also why frozen food doesn't last forever).

throwanem 10y ago

> What do you think "you" are exactly? A durable process, running on a human brain, that refers to itself in the first person singular and has a nasty habit of assuming it's the whole point of the exercise. (And which does something like checkpointing so that, when it crashes and comes back up, it can restore some state and pretend it's the same process as it was at last checkpoint.) This process can be impaired or disabled entirely, whether permanently by brain lesions or temporarily by transcranial magnetic stimulation. "I" can be made to believe it is dead, or to cease functioning entirely. Curiously, this does not result in the state commonly described as "unconsciousness" - itself a telling choice of name. Humans in this state remain aware of their environments and exhibit executive and cognitive function. While cognition is often somewhat deranged and maintenance of the body lacking, the possibility is quite real that humans can, and perhaps do, function perfectly well without any self-awareness whatsoever. I find this idea disquieting, but then of course I would, because it suggests "I" am far from the irreducible essence "I" like to imagine "myself" to be, and indeed this body might function more to both its own benefit and that of society if "I" did not exist at all. The instinct toward self-preservation appears to inhere in consciousness as well as in the organism entire, so of course it makes sense that consciousnesses should fancy the idea of preserving their existence, even as copies with no ongoing continuity of identity past the point of duplication, at a frankly astonishing resource investment with its concomitant opportunity cost. Nonexistence is after all the ultimate terror for something whose most fundamental verity is the basically egotistical axiom that it exists. But the very fact that this idea of self-preservation at ruinous cost seems other than prima facie absurd to consciousness is in itself perhaps evidence that consciousness is maladaptive.